Adolph Luetgert did not grind his wife up into sausage.
It's understandable how this myth originated. Police charged Luetgert with
killing his wife and dissolving her body in a vat, which happened to be
inside the sausage factory he owned. The factory was shut down at the
time, however, and officials never said he had made her into sausage. Even
at the time of the trials, people made jokes about Luetgert turning his
wife
into wurst. The myth persists a century later. The ABC News Web site
included Luetgert in a 2002 Internet article about cannibalistic murders,
incorrectly noting: "In 1897, Chicago butcher Adolph Luetgert killed his
wife and made sausages out of her, which he sold to unsuspecting
customers."

The Luetgert sausage factory, where the murder allegedly occurred, did not
burn down in 1902. In fact, the building is still there.

A story about a fire destroying the factory has been repeated in many
articles and books about the Luetgert case. I haven't been able to
determine exactly where this myth originated; it appeared in some
newspaper articles a half-century ago. At some point, a writer made
an error about the year of the fire. And someone wrongly assumed that the
fire had destroyed the building. Those mistakes have been repeated ever
since by writers copying second- and third-hand sources rather than going
back to the original reports.

There was a fire at the Luetgert factory, but it was in 1904, not
1902. The fire gutted the interior of the building, but did not destroy
the structure. The former Luetgert factory was recently converted into
condominiums. The building is located on the south side of Diversey just
west of Hermitage and east of the nearby railroad tracks. (For many decades, this
stretch of Hermitage had been vacated, but a sign for Hermitage was
recently erected again at the corner with Diversey, marking the entrance
to the condominium parking lot.)
Read more about
the history of the Luetgert building.

Luetgert did not go insane in
prison, ranting that he was seeing his wife's ghost.
This story has been told in several books and articles as well, but it is
almost certainly apocryphal. None of the newspaper stories published at
the time of Luetgert's death in 1899 say anything of the sort. In fact, it
makes no sense that Luetgert would have seen his wife's ghost at the same
time that he was insisting upon his innocence —
and claiming that his wife was still alive.